Miranda July gained enormous mass appeal over night with her debut motion picture Me And You And Everyone We Know. Without stars and on a tight budget she managed to create “a small cinematic wonder”, as the press liked to put it: The original US-Independent-Comedy received awards at the Sundance and Cannes film festivals and was a firm favourite with the audience at the Viennale a few months later. So it’s no wonder that the film will soon be taken into the DVD edition of the biggest film festival in Austria.

However, even before the success of her first feature film the media and performance artist had already attracted attention with videos. In her first short film Atlanta (1996, 10 minutes) July recreates the press conference of an Olympic swimmer who talks to the journalists together with her mother (both roles played by July herself) about the big goal – “going for the gold” … but whose goal is it really? “Hard to take when the daughter flinches in front of the camera while the mother whispers to her to finally say ‘I love you, mom’” – thus the Viennese film critic Maya McKechneay describes the visualisation of the “oppressive ratio of power and dependency”.

Two years on, in her 14-minute video The Amateurist, July takes on two roles once again – the “professional” woman and the “amateur” who has been under constant video-surveillance of the former since four years. Another two years later 25-year-old July, who was born in 1974 in Barre (Vermont), directed the short film Nest of Tens, which won her the main prize of the renowned short-film-festival Oberhausen. The 27 minute film is the exact opposite of her subsequent feature film – four dire, discomforting, near surreal and nightmarish episodes about the exertion of control.

„Nest of Tens and Me And You And Everyone We Know are ultimately both about attempts to communicate. Their characters struggle to find words, gestures, actions that really build synapses to the inner life of their counterparts, without having to use set phrases. In this spirit July also always conceived her own works as a form of communication”, writes McKechneay: “Communication and its boundaries – maybe that’s how one could describe July’s major theme.” As a performance artist the 33-year-old drop-out art student constantly seeks contact to her audience.

After Nest of Tens July – incidentally, her stage name was taken from her “most creative month”, while her real name is Miranda Jennifer Grossinger – directed two more short films: the 7-minute Getting Stronger Every Day (2001) about the lifelong sense of being lost and found again, and the 4-minute Haysha Royko (2003) about three people negate time and space at the airport of Portland. Her endearingly eccentric short films, which are shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum among others, will be shown in the course of VIS Vienna Independent Shorts in their entirety.